Researchers Identify a Missing Piece of the Lyme Disease Puzzle
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Researchers identify a missing piece of the Lyme disease puzzle:
Lyme disease is the most reported vector-borne disease in the country. Over the past 20 years, the United States has experienced a dramatic increase in both the number of reported cases and the geographic distribution of the disease. In Virginia, the disease is transmitted by blacklegged ticks, which are infected with the Lyme disease-causing bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi.
Virginia Tech Assistant Professor Brandon Jutras and his lab have continued to tackle the Lyme disease epidemic over the past year, and they have recently identified another missing piece of the Lyme disease puzzle.
"This discovery furthers our understanding of how Borrelia burgdorferi causes inflammation and disease," said Mari Davis, who is the lead author on the paper, a former master's graduate of the Jutras lab in the Department of Biochemistry in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "It is a testament to how unique that this bacterium is -- and how we need to keep working to understand more about what is going on behind the scenes in order to develop future diagnostics and treatments."
Their findings were recently published in PLOS Pathogens, a peer-reviewed open-access medical journal.
[...] With this new piece to the puzzle in hand, Jutras plans to add to the lab's current efforts to improve the diagnostic testing and treatment of Lyme disease.
"From a prevention and diagnostic perspective, it's possible that the combination of peptidoglycan and NapA could be a novel target for diagnostics," Jutras said. "It could, in theory, be a possible avenue of vaccine development as well. These are big picture possibilities that we are actively pursuing. One thing that we know for sure is that this finding furthers our understanding of how peptidoglycan can drive Lyme arthritis patient symptology."
Journal Reference:
Marisela M. Davis, Aaron M. Brock, Tanner G. DeHart, et al. The peptidoglycan-associated protein NapA plays an important role in the envelope integrity and in the pathogenesis of the lyme disease spirochete, PLOS Pathogens (DOI: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1009546)
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